InternetLib

InternetLib is a small Haskell library for accessing the internet, primarily for use with Fudgets, although many of the functions (e.g., the ones for dealing with HTML documents) do not depend on the Fudget library.

Most of the stuff here was originally not written with the intention to form a general library, but for a specific purpose: it was needed in the web browser WWWBrowser. This library is thus mostly a collection of reusable stuff from the implementation of WWWBrowser.

Other applications built on top of this library include:

wwwchecklinks: a utility to scan (part of) a web site and reports broken links.
Links: a utility to extract links from an HTML document.
UrlGet: a utility to download a document from a URL.
Trams: a special-purpose web server for searching for travel routes in the Göteborg public transport system.

The main ingredients of the library are:

htmlFetchF, for use in web clients (to fetch documents from URLs),
simpleHttpServer for creating web servers.
The type Html, with various accompanying functions, e.g., parseHtml and printHtml.
The type GIFFile, which makes displaying GIF images just as easy as displaing text in Fudget programs.

The index lists everything exported from the library. The beginner index lists only the simple stuff (but more things should be classified as simple...).

The library may be extended in the future.

[Old] Compiling programs with hbc

To use InternetLib, you should import it:

import InternetLib

To compile programs using InternetLib, use the command

hbcxmake -contrib -i%InternetLib programname

History

~1993: The work on WWWBrowser began.
May 1998: The first version of this library was created.
February 2001: The Html type and related functions were added.
April 2001: simpleHttpServer with related types and functions were added.
July 2010: internet.cabal and fudgets-internet.cabal were added (splitting the library into two parts).
April 2023: Support for PNG images was added (optionally included, since it adds dependencies on bytestring and zlib).
May 2023: JuicyPixels can now be used to load JPEG images without calling external programs. Added the program imageViewer to view any type of image supported by JuicyPixels.
September 2023: the source repository was converted from CVS to darcs.

Last modified: Sun Mar 23 22:13:13 CET 2025

Thomas Hallgren